Only a Matter of Time
by AliceTrent
Summary: You can live your entire life as someone you're not, but it only takes one decision to see who you truly are. For Angela J. Verne, that decision was to stop taking her meds. The result? Angela began to see memories of a different person: an angel.
1. Flush

A/N: Love the books, love the characters, wish they were mine. Sadly they all belong to James Patterson. I just make them do my evil bidding! Mwa ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Please don't sue. Oh and this is my first time publishing, so no really bad comments please.

Angela J. Verne had never really liked her name. She had been nicknamed Angy when she was young, but to Denise and Roger, she was always Angela J. when she had done something wrong. Like right now.

"Angela J., you get over here this second!" Her mother screamed through the door. Overprotective, always had been and always would be, Denise Verne was currently very much upset with her daughter over the fact that her daughter had gotten a tattoo. Angela was not a bad child. She was dedicated to her schoolwork, and had never done drugs. Therefore, as this was Angela's first real act of retaliation, she could not understand why her parents were reacting so harshly.

"I am not coming out until you will actually listen to what I have to say." The bathroom door was locked, her mother stood on the other side having a meltdown.

"Just wait until your father hears about this!" Denise shuffled off down the hallway in a state of shear panic to call Roger, grumbling about tramp stamps and STDs.

Angela pounded her fist into the wall, but only succeeded in scraping her knuckles. It seemed like her parents had so many more issues than the parents of other teenagers. Then again, every fifteen-year-old girl thought that. The problem for Angela was that her parents were not her own.

Immediately after her birth, Angela had been left on the front steps of the Glenville Fire House, with not even a hint as to who her birth parents were. As her previous foster parents had often lovingly told her: "You are the common crack whore's failure to wear a condom while prostituting herself." She had been unaware until that placement that so many insults could be packed into one sentence. She had been through the failed system, lived with the paranoids, the losers, the perverts, and the ones who just plain didn't care. All things considered she was lucky to have the overprotectives, who were slightly insane only due to their need to keep her out of harms way. And yet, regardless, Angela was a damaged child.

She also had a host of disorders as well, all of them rare conditions she didn't notice or care about. Honestly Angela didn't even know all of the names. She did know her meds though. Pink pill after every meal, blue ones in the morning and before bed, and a nasty tasting beige colored one on her period. Denise kept track of all the other, more irregular drugs.

Angela thought the whole thing was just stupid. If she wasn't meant to live naturally, then she didn't want to live. She had a cutoff point. If she was sixty with a broken hip, was still taking more meds than she could count, and spent her days watching Seinfeld and Friends reruns like Denise's mother, than she would go skydiving without a parachute. She would try to hold on to her miserable life until then, though, on the off chance that something good happened to her. Which had about the odds of winning the lottery twice, but still.

As a marginally talented author with way too much time on her hands, I have always assumed that, the author is God, completely in control of her story. I was under the impression that I could make my characters do whatever I pleased. However I have lately realized that my characters have begun to rebel. I would have had Angela simply put on her "I'm-sorry-I-disappointed-you-and-will-do-better-next-time" face. Had she complied, she would have gone on to lead a perfectly normal life, gotten married, had kids, and grown old with her high school sweet-heart, which occurs in most lifeless, plot-less FanFiction. Yet, somehow, I stand in awe as my characters develop minds of their own. You see, instead of simply unlocking the bathroom door to face the music, Angela opened up the cabinet, popped off nine identical child safe lids, and proceeded to flush all of her medication down the toilet. She then refilled all nine now empty bottles with Motrin and Tylenol, and replaced them in the cupboard.

Someone once told me once that you aren't truly writing until your characters start writing for you. That person is very smart and speaks his mind, which is both refreshing and insulting, and has earned him more than one broken nose. I honestly hope he's right. I wish that Angela knew what she was getting herself into. The second she emptied that last bottle of meds into the toilet, she had become set on a path from which there could be no return.

Angela Julia Verne hated her name. Her friends just called her Angel.


	2. Under the Stars

A/N: Not mine! Don't sue! By the way, don't mind the sarcasm. It manages to slip in when you are writing at like three in the morning. Enjoy! Oh, and if you want, read with Eisley's Marvelous Things, that's how I wrote it.

Ever since she could remember, Angela had loved the stars. She used to get up after whichever family she was currently living with had put her to sleep. She would open the window as quietly as possible. Her fingers were always blistered from unscrewing the screen behind it. She would climb outside onto the lawn with a blanket. Angela could only fall asleep under the stars, with the twinkling eyes of the universe keeping watch over her. When the sun rose, she would climb back through the window, and back into bed. She was always cautious to replace the screen and lock the window again.

During the harsh winters in upstate New York, Angela was forced to sleep inside. She would remain glued to her window throughout the night. Sometimes she would cry on cloudy nights. If Angela was going to sleep, she needed peace, absolute silence, and starlight.

Angela lay in bed hands fisted in her comforter, waiting for her anger to fade enough so she could sleep. The fight had lasted for over two hours, and ended with Roger threatening to disown her, Angela swearing like a sailor, and everyone going to bed hating each other more than usual.

Her "tramp stamp" was safe for now. The idea had come to her in her sleep, over a week ago.

In the dream, Angela stood on a cliff, above a canyon, completely naked, but not embarrassed. The sun was rising in the east, casting a reds and oranges over the landscape, like a screen over her eyes that bathed everything in a surreal glow. She walked step by step towards the edge of the cliff, to the beat of the song playing in her head. She was going to die.

There was a faint ripping sound, and she stopped moving, with her toes curling just over the jagged edge of the cliff. A strong wind lifted her hair, whipping it

around her face.

Angela began to cry, hard sobs wracking through her, making her chest heave, but she was absolutely silent. The only sound she heard was the wind. Then the tearing sound, again, and this time her whole body jerked forward. Her back spasmed painfully, as though an invisible force was trying to make her lean too far over the edge of the cliff. Suddenly, there was an explosion of brilliant pain in her shoulders, and a pair of wings tore through her back.

She teetered on the edge, reeling, the pumping of angel's wings keeping her from falling. They lifted her from the ground. She hovered there, a foot from the edge of the canyon. It was unnerving to be standing on air. She suddenly pulled her wings tightly against her back, and dropped down into the canyon, out of view.

Angela's eyes opened, swollen, with tears streaming, her hands knotted into her hair, to the sound of her alarm. It was Friday morning, at five thirty. She untangled herself from her sheets, and rushed to the bathroom. The walls, a yellow-green color that would be considered nauseating in general, now seemed loathsomely disgusting. Angela sat quickly in front of the toilet and vomited. She had a pounding headache. Her fingers shook. She sank to her knees.

Angela took a hot shower to try and sooth her aching muscles. The feeling of water running down her body relaxed her muscles, as though she was getting a massage, but her mind was in a state of organized chaos. She wasn't really into 'dream interpretation' and all that stuff the creepy kids at school got into, but the dream had felt all too real, and Angela couldn't just let this dream slip back into her subconscious like the rest. She stepped from the shower, her wet hair plastered to her face, and used her hand to wipe away the steam on the mirror. Turning around slowly, she examined her bare back. There were no soft angel wings hanging gracefully. She was almost disappointed. She could however see long bruises, stretching down from her neck to just above the subtle curve of her hips. Apparently she had been thrashing around in real life just as much as she had been in her dream.

She put on her jean shorts, and threw on a tee, then did something she would be in a great deal of trouble for if she ever got caught.

"Denise?" She called down the hallway, "I'm not feeling so good. I think I'm going to stay home today. Is that alright?" There was rustling as Denise rolled over in bed to talk to Roger, who she consulted on every matter, due to her apparent lack of brain cells.

"Just for today," she shouted down the stairs. "You know Roger and I both have to be in work today."

"Yeah, I'll be fine. I'm going to go back to sleep."

"There's macaroni salad in the fridge from yesterday, you can eat that for lunch."

"Thanks," Angela grumbled under her breath. She hated macaroni salad.

She locked her bedroom door, and just like she always did as a kid, opened her window, removed the screen and pulled it sideways through the window, shoving it under her bed so that Denise and Roger wouldn't see it. Then Angela clambered, with a little less grace than she would have liked, out her first story window. Keeping low, she moved across the front yard. It was still dark out, as summer was transitioning into the darker days of autumn, so if her parents were to look out the window, they would see only another shifting shadow, probably a coyote; they were common in the area.

Finally, Angela reached the base of the tall oak in their back yard. Sitting down behind it, making sure she was invisible from the street, she bundled her bag close to her chest and rested her head on her drawn up knees. Angela waited for them to leave. Eventually, the lights in the house went off, the garage door opened, and a worn out old Ford truck, and a newer black car left, turning opposite directions at the end of the drive.

Angela, slinging her bag over her shoulder, began to climb up the tree. It wasn't the first time she had been up the tree, and certainly not the last. But she had never gone as high as she was now. The uppermost branches were ten feet higher than the roof of the house, and allowed Angela perfect access to simply drop onto the roof.

She wrapped her legs around a sturdy limb and began to pull herself, upside down, away from the tree and towards the roof. With the roof a couple feet below her, she unhooked her legs, and dropped, landing in a crouch, her palms scraping slightly against the rough tiles.

Smiling triumphantly, she pulled her sketchbook and a charcoal pencil from her bag, and began to sketch as accurately as she could remember, the vision of her wings. Angela didn't consider herself an artist; anything she drew, she had to be looking at. In her opinion, nothing she had ever drawn was original, including the wings. But it was definitely the best she had ever done.

The eastern sky was beginning to lighten, and a cool breeze ruffled her hair around her face. She felt like she was living the dream again, bare and open to the world, privy to all the secrets of the universe.

She had drawn with only the moonlight, the wings of her dream, and on a whim, Angela added a small sun, rising between the tops of the wings. It was magical. She felt empowered and unafraid.

But then again, that's what sleeping under the stars will do to you.


End file.
